Art: Man Is Ultimate Value

In the catalogue for his new exhibition at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery, burly, amiable Ben Shahn, 60, himself dean of protest painters, sharply challenged the current cult of abstract expressionism. Said he:

"It is claimed that nonobjective art is the perfect expression of what now seems to be an atomic age, or is in any case a scientificomechanical age, and perhaps that is true. For the nonobjective painting claims validity only for its mechanics, for the material with which it is made and the manner of their organization. It rejects man, his life, his visions, his philosophies, his future.

"But I think that artists ought to recognize this, that there is no moral reason why art ought to go on if it has nothing further to express. Nor is there any moral or esthetic reason why the public ought to bend the knee in reverence before the mere fact of art.

"Art is important only if it essays to be important. If it adopts the manners and philosophy and outlook of a minor expression, then a minor expression it will be. If it aspires to an esthetic of doubletalk, just that will be its position, nothing more, and life itself will walk around it and let it alone."

Shahn concluded with a plea to artists to put mankind back into art. "Society needs more than anything else to be reminded that man is, in himself, ultimate value. It needs to be reminded that neither the pressure of events nor the exigencies of diplomacy can warrant the final debasement of man. Art is neither use, nor appointed task; but given human compulsions, some intellectual stature and great competence, it can perhaps bring man back into focus as being of supreme importance."